Daniel Ojukwu’s Remand Is a Test of Nigeria’s Press Freedom

On 1 May 2024, Daniel Ojukwu, a reporter with the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ), vanished in Lagos. His phones were off, and his family and colleagues could not reach him. FIJ filed a missing person report. Only later did they learn that officers from the Inspector General of Police’s Intelligence Response Team had detained him and held him incommunicado at a criminal investigation department in the city. He was then moved to the police cybercrime centre in Abuja. Ten days passed before he was freed, only after public protest and pressure from rights groups.

The complaint behind it came from Mrs Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire, who served as senior special assistant on the Sustainable Development Goals to former president Muhammadu Buhari. FIJ had published a series of reports about her office between late 2023 and early 2024. One examined a payment of 147.1 million naira to a restaurant for building classrooms in Lagos. Another questioned a 47.5 million naira contract. Others looked at a 241 million naira forfeiture involving the anti-corruption agency, and at solar panels that reportedly stopped working a week after installation. The police said Ojukwu had a case to answer under the Cybercrimes Act.

Strikingly, the police never invited Ojukwu for questioning before arresting him. They had, however, questioned Bukky Shonibare, chair of FIJ’s board of trustees, in Abuja and raised the story with her. His passport was later withheld on the grounds that he might flee.

The matter returned this month, on 10 November 2026, when a Federal High Court judge in Abuja remanded Ojukwu in Kuje prison until 1 December. The twelve-count case was brought by the police against him and FIJ’s founder, Fisayo Soyombo. Prosecutors claim Soyombo is at large, though the judge declined to issue a bench warrant because he has not yet been brought before her. Six counts allege cyberstalking, including that the reports were intended to harass Orelope-Adefulire and put her in fear of death or bodily harm. The other six allege criminal defamation, with prosecutors claiming the journalists published falsehoods knowingly. Ojukwu pleaded not guilty. The judge declined to continue his administrative bail, noting that his court bail application had been filed only the day before and was not ready to be heard.

It is not an isolated incident. In 2019, Agba Jalingo, publisher of CrossRiverWatch, was arrested and charged under Section 24 after publishing articles accusing the Cross River governor of corruption. Fejiro Oliver, a Delta-based journalist, has faced four counts of cyberstalking under the same section since 2017 for distributing reporting. In February 2024, four journalists at The Informant247 in Kwara State were charged with conspiracy, cyberstalking and defamation over a fraud investigation, after two of them answered a police summons to come in for questioning following a complaint from a polytechnic rector. That September, four more journalists were charged in a Lagos federal court under sections 24 and 27 over reporting that implicated the chief executive of Guaranty Trust Bank in alleged fraud. In 2025, Alefia and Asiwaju Media Company were charged with five counts of publishing “false” statements on a media platform and on Facebook under the same sections. More recently, Stanley Ugagbe of Secret Reporter was remanded in Kuje after being charged with conspiracy and cyberstalking over reports on a Central Bank deputy governor. There is a pattern where once a powerful person complains, a reporter is arrested.

The problem lies in how the Cybercrimes Act works in practice. Section 24, which deals with cyberstalking, is drafted so loosely that it can be stretched to cover criticism of the powerful. Reporting that a contract looks irregular is not obviously the same as stalking, yet that is the offence under which half these cases are framed. The Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 25 journalists were prosecuted under the Act in the years before its 2024 amendment. Its more recent count is at least 29. The 2024 amendments have not ended the pattern. In July 2022, the ECOWAS Court found that Section 24 violated freedom of expression and ordered the government to repeal or amend it. In April 2025, the National Human Rights Commission itself cautioned against the arbitrary use of Section 24 against journalists and activists. Amnesty International described Ojukwu’s 2024 detention as an enforced disappearance.

Process matters as much as statute. When an arrest precedes any invitation to answer questions, a journalist is held without sight of the paperwork against him and his passport is withheld, the punishment begins long before any verdict. The Act lets a complainant turn a story into a criminal file.

That is how the Act silences dissent. It does not need convictions to work. The arrest, remand and withheld passport do the job. An editor weighing a story about a public service or a bank executive now has to ask if it is worth a night in a cell or a year of court dates. Reporters who ask that question will sometimes decide the safer course is to say nothing. The vague wording of Section 24 makes it easy to target anyone who speaks truth to power, because “intent to harass” can be read into almost any critical report. The offence turns on how a powerful complainant feels about the story, not on whether the story is accurate.

A law that punishes the messenger protects the officials who most need scrutiny. Until Section 24 is repealed or rewritten so that truthful public-interest reporting cannot be prosecuted, the next journalist to question a powerful person will be taking the same risk.